Producers today face volatile markets, decreasing customer commitments, mass production, and shorter product life cycles. In response, producers have turned to flexible production planning and supply chain management (SCM).
Generally speaking, SCM encompasses cross-company coordination and optimization of material, information, and value within a value creation chain. One goal of SCM is to provide customers with products at agreed-upon due dates at relatively low cost. This goal can be achieved if production planning enables producers to plan delivery due dates relatively precisely. Different factors, however, may impact the ability to plan delivery due dates precisely. For example, different operations may be required to satisfy a production order. These operations may depend on the availability of different resources, and it may be difficult to ascertain the availability of those resources.
As noted above, production processes may include different operations, examples of which include, but are not limited to, processing steps, transportation of products between locations, manufacturing intermediate products, and assembling intermediate products into end products. Different operations can depend on each other, creating a network of dependencies. In order to provide production planning in such an environment, SCM includes enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, which provides planning and optimizing tools. One example of such software, the Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO) from SAP® AG, facilitates planning and detailed scheduling of operations needed to satisfy productions orders. APO may use data from demand planning and supply network planning utilities in order to plan operations based on availability of resources.
Production planning software such as APO, however, is not currently configured to identify critical operations of a production process. A “critical” operation, in this context, is an operation that acts as a bottleneck or an interruption in the production process if it is not performed according to specific parameters (e.g., at a specific time). As a result, production planners need to examine production processes manually in order to determine which operation(s) are critical to meeting the due date of a production order.